What Is The Best Swimming Stroke?

If you can get away with it, you should bail on work right now and head to your local beach, blasting this beach-forward Deadcast on your stereo or in your headphones as you do so. What’s your boss going to do about it? Fire you? Quite possibly, but that’s not happening until you get back from the damn beach!

But also: not every person is made for the beach. Drew is at the beach with his family as you read this, and I just got back a couple days ago from a similar scenario with mine. Neither one of your Deadcast hosts are, strictly speaking, built for outdoor use. Both of us have the complexion of two-percent milk and Drew wears one of those rash-guard shirts while he’s out there honking at his kids and scanning the horizon for passing dolphins he can point out to other beachgoers. I, as a cool guy, mostly either just lie there reading a book that weighs three pounds or get bossed around by a 7-year-old nephew intent on building an elaborate and doomed sand-based metroplex. None of this is exactly approved beach behavior, but it’s the best we can do. Considering that the alternative is not going to the beach at all, it still seems like the right thing to do.

Our bodies were not yet at the beach when we recorded this one, but our brains were getting there. The resulting free-jazz Funbag odyssey includes questions about the most punchable people in sports, the possibility of a normal smart person becoming a successful NFL assistant, and an unprompted and highly scientific ranking of the best swimming strokes, but our vacation brains kept pulling us further and further out into the deeper waters of digression. There we discussed Billy Crystal’s luridly cursed Jazz Man routine and Bono’s unacceptable Jamaican accent at Bob Marley’s Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame induction and Donald Trump’s likely vendetta against Weird Al Yankovic and a number of other things that were not strictly germane to any other things. We will both be back from the beach next week, but it seems likely that our brains will still be somewhere else, getting sunburned and doing the elementary backstroke out beyond the breakers, in the rise of the cooler waters, either waiting for something or just staying afloat in the sun.

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